On the Russian émigré experience
No matter what country you were in, it was the same. You saw only Russians and the real people of the country simply seemed like scenery.
On being a tennis coach in Germany
It ruined my serve.
On what his science gave him
[An indescribable] sense of power, of triumph over nature.
On Lolita as a new turn from Russia to America
Humbert Humbert is a salad of genes, but he has no Russian genes.
On Hemingway
A writer for boys.
On Thomas Mann
A small writer who did big stories badly.
On Thomas Wolfe
Mediocrity!
What lies behind Humbert Humbert’s name?
Humbug.
On Humbert
A complicated European with backgrounds gleaming through backgrounds.
On what he felt in composing Lolita
The excitement and pleasure of creating my own world.
On the heroine of The Enchanter, the original of Lolita
[Only a] shadow—not a real person.
On television
That horrible instrument.
On how he feels when Mrs. Nabokov parks him under a tree to write
Comfortable, pleasantly enclosed, and shut off from the world.
On Olympia Press’s accepting Lolita
Books are like children….After you go to all the trouble of raising them you want to see them married. Perhaps this wasn’t the happiest marriage for Lolita, but it was something. It at least offered me the chance of seeing my work in print and having it between covers for my bookshelf….It sold more copies in the first few weeks, than all my other books put together….What shall I do with the money? Perhaps I could buy a soccer team.
On filming Lolita
It was perfectly all right for me to imagine a 12-year-old Lolita….She existed inside my head. But to make a real 12-year-old girl play such a part in public would be sinful and immoral, and I will never consent to it.
* “Lolita and the Lepidopterist: Author Nabokov Is Awed by Sensation He Created,” Life International, April 13, 1959, 63–69. VN was interviewed by O’Neil on Sept. 5 and 6, 1958 (“I spent two delightful days with Paul O’Neil, who pumped me very delicately with great skill and acumen,” VN to Walter Minton, Sept. 9, 1958, VNA Berg), before Carl Mydans came to photograph him for the magazine on Sept. 13. The interview did not appear until seven months later, and not in the American but only in the international edition.